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Down With Divas! (3 Habits Of Highly Ineffective Team Players)

The modern-day BBC adaptation of the Sherlock stories are leaving a wake of swooning that’s only partly due to Benedict Cumberbatch’s letter-opener cheekbones. There’s something seductive about the lonely, troubled diva-genius: Just witness the hormonal outpourings the series provokes.

But sometimes, the lure of the diva is such that an entire team finds itself playing John Watson to the diva’s Sherlock. If you think this organizational approach is doomed to fail, you’d be right: the latest research shows that teams saddled with divas fall apart—rapidly.

In the two decades that I’ve been (a) dating and (b) working in tech, I’ve learned one thing: The Sherlock effect gets old really fast. We’ve all worked with them: the rock-star engineer, the troubled code poet, the diva-DBA. It’s hard not to be impressed by someone who works in mysterious ways.

But the problem arises when their narcissistic narrative meets real life. The team learns not to trouble the DBA-diva with questions, the rock-star engineer can’t be left alone with clients, the code poet believes social niceties are for mortals…

Death By Diva? Is it any wonder that these people—though individually brilliant—are collectively poisonous?

Teams that need to accommodate divas face a triple-whammy of problems:

1. they can’t communicate with each other, 2. they can’t learn from each other, and 3. they can’t identify where the problem is coming from.

Group-Psychology Says Let’s look at what researchers show us about communication.

First, something called “constructive conflict” is critical to successful teamwork, says Prof. Piet van den Bossche of the University of Maastricht. Constructive conflict is made up of a willingness to be critical “regarding each others’ contributions…thorough consideration of each others’ ideas and comments, and [an ability to] address differences in opinion and speak freely,” he wrote in a 2010 study on effective team learning.

Constructive conflict requires a generous helping of trust and humility. Just one diva on a team can kill the constructive part of the conflict faster than a ton of boron in a nuclear reactor. The lone genius with the big ego, who isn’t used to having to explain themselves, is hopeless at the open, back-and-forth discussion that a team needs in order to flourish.

Secondly, if the team can’t communicate in a way that fosters learning, everybody loses out, as Boris Maciejovsky of the University of California argues. He and his colleagues studied how teams learn to perform challenging, counterintuitive tasks. He found that, if a team learned well together, the individuals in that team also got smarter.

Even up to five weeks later, the individuals who learned how to do the tasks in high-functioning teams still showed significant individual improvements in performance. The researchers concluded that learning as a team has a long-lasting, positive effect on individual performance.

Finally, when a team misfires because of a diva, the problem can be hard to diagnose. Too often the problem is compounded by managers who take the diva’s self-promoting activities at face value, laying the blame on the rest of the team.

Dr. Vivienne Ming, Chief Scientist at Gild, told me that the algorithms they develop to search social networks for talented engineers are explicitly weighted to reward collaborative behaviors. This makes good business sense, she argues: Collaborative engineers build better solutions and tend to stay in post longer than divas.

Diva Damage Limitation I’ve used the term “diva” a lot, without really defining it. I suppose you know one when you meet one, right?

But perhaps the best definition comes from Dr. Jana Raver of Queens University, Canada. What I’m referring to as divas, she rather more technically defines as team members that have “low benevolence values.” It’s not the divas’ skills that make them problematic, it’s their unwillingness to learn and teach.

Her solution is simple. Managers need to model the behavior they want to see in their teams. Again, it all comes down to encouraging collaborative conflict.

The Bottom Line If a leader is prepared to demonstrate a healthy collaborative conflict style—and to reward team members who do likewise—it’s possible to rebuild trust and communication in even the most diva-pecked teams.

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